“Incredible flying, Kat!” Dallas Nielson said, clutching the back of Kat’s seat.
“That… was actually a lucky mistake,” Kat replied. “I thought we were dead.”
“You got them, Kat,” Robert added quietly, his eyes on the smoke below.
“The question is,” Kat replied, “who were they?”
She tore her eyes away from the smoke and concentrated on climbing back to a higher altitude. Da Nang couldn’t be more than ten miles away to the east, and a plan, however improbable, was beginning to form in her mind — provided she could figure out how to land the old Huey without killing them all.
In the middle of a thicket of ferns, bushes, and brush some forty feet from the burning remains of the borrowed UH-1, something moved. A massive tangle of branches had cushioned the fall of a body thrown from the door of the crashing helicopter as the tail boom struck the tree trunk.
The figure stirred again, and tried to rise.
Arlin Schoen rubbed his eyes and looked around, the receding sounds of the helicopter he had intended to destroy in his ears as he spit out part of a branch, took inventory of his limbs, and calculated his remaining options.
CHAPTER 27
The Da Nang Airport ramp was less than five miles ahead.
Kat squinted to see through the steady hurricane of wind blowing through the hole in the windscreen. She slowed the Huey as much as she could and motioned Robert and Dallas close to the back of her seat.
“Robert, do you have any idea… who those assassins were?”
He nodded. “On the ground at the crash site, I recognized one of them from Hong Kong. One of the goons who tried to snatch me.”
“So, as I figured, they were trying to keep you from talking,” Kat said, working hard to keep her control movements conservative and the Huey flying smoothly.
“But as I told you, I really don’t know anything yet to talk about,” Robert said. “That’s the ridiculous part. They’ve validated the fact that Walter Carnegie really had stumbled onto something, but I still don’t know what.”
“Robert, we don’t have much time, and I’ve got to try to land this thing, but”—she looked back over her shoulder at him—“they left their business jet up ahead.”
Dan had been standing beside Dallas and behind Kat. He reached out and grabbed Kat’s shoulder. “This is the copilot, Dan Wade. Who are you?” he asked.
“Special Agent Kat Bronsky of the FBI, Captain Wade. I’m sorry, there was no time to—”
“Don’t apologize! You rescued us. There’s no better introduction. But you mentioned a business jet?”
“Yes.”
“What kind? Not a Bombardier Global Express, by any chance?”
Kat turned partially in the seat to try to see Dan Wade’s face, but he was standing directly behind her and the momentary diversion caused her to bobble the controls. She turned her attention back to stabilizing the Huey and slowing.
“Dan, it is a Global Express. I think it may be the same one that shot, or sabotaged, your plane.”
There was a long pause before Dan spoke. “It was a Global Express that took off ahead of us, all right. He had to be part of it. There may have been a fighter out there too, because someone fired a missile that exploded in front of us.”
“The Air Force thinks it may have been a special phosphorous warhead, designed to flash-blind you,” Kat said.
“Yeah. That would be about right. It was hideously bright. I thought at first it was a nuclear blast in the distance, but since we immediately hit a shock wave, it had to be an exploding missile.”
Da Nang was on the nose now, two miles away. Kat felt her frustration rising that the small necessity of figuring out how to land was blocking some key questions. She looked hard at the ramp up ahead, relieved to see the Global Express was still parked in the same place. Kat turned slightly in Dan’s direction. “We’ll talk later. In the meantime, I plan to steal their Global Express, search it, and fly the evidence home.”
“You can do that?” Dallas asked, her eyebrows up. “You can fly a jet, too?”
“Well, I’m not trained in a Global Express, but I can fly it safely… with help.” She worked to find the right combination of power and pitch to slow the Huey a bit more and continue to lose altitude, aiming for the same spot they had occupied a few hours before, a hundred feet from the Global Express.
“Okay, everyone, this could get rough. Everyone please strap in!”
“You need me up here, Kat?” Robert asked, pointing to the copilot’s seat.
She turned quickly and nodded. “Yes. Moral support, at least. Wait! First, look out that left side and tell me whether I’ve got enough of the landing skid remaining to support this machine’s weight.”
She pulled back slightly on the stick, forgetting to lessen the pitch angle of the rotor blades — and the lift they were generating — with the collective lever. With less of the lift going to forward motion and more directed upward, the Huey began to climb sharply.
Gotta remember, down on the collective when I’m slowing like this. She made the adjustment and started descending again. The airspeed was less than thirty knots, and this time she was forcing herself to feed in some rudder to keep the Huey from turning as she slowed.
Robert was back, climbing over the center panel to get in the left seat. “Kat, the forward strut is gone, but the back strut is still there, and I think it’ll hold. The skid itself is partly there, attached to the rear strut.”
“If it doesn’t hold,” Kat said, “she’ll fall to the left on touchdown and the blades will hit the ground.”
They were less than a hundred feet from the target spot on the ramp, still moving forward at ten knots. Kat milked the stick back slowly and lessened the collective to compensate for the changing flight dynamics. She felt herself working the rudder pedals too much, and the nose swung back and forth, left and right, as she coaxed the Huey into what could pass for a hover and let it continue to descend. Her inputs on the stick were much calmer now, but still causing the helicopter to dance around.
She could see the Global Express just ahead, and she could see something else, which chilled her: The forward door was open and the stairs had been extended.
The momentary loss of concentration was too much. Suddenly she was behind the machine again, nudging the stick left when it should have gone right, and shoving it right when it needed only a nudge left, until they were rocking violently back and forth in all three axes as she struggled for control.
“DAMPEN YOUR INPUTS!” Dan Wade yelled forward, feeling the gyrations. “Easy does it! THINK the controls. Don’t move them!”
Kat felt herself tensing. Her hands shook, defying her attempts to relax. Any correction on the collective lever, and they were either dropping dangerously or rising precipitously. For every axis she brought under control, another would slip away into a left pirouette, a forward or backward motion, or just another severe case of the wobbles.
She was breathing hard, holding on, calculating the distance to the ground at twenty feet as she held the stick fairly still and forced herself to merely think the collective down a hair.
Obediently, the Huey began moving down ever so slightly, but going sideways to the right. Think it left! she commanded herself, amazed when the sideward movement ceased. Ten feet! Okay, just hold this, hold this.…
They settled to within three feet of the ramp, all forward motion now stopped. The Huey slowly turned to the left as she successfully tried the new technique again and felt the skids touch with surprising gentleness, the one on the left giving a little, then rocking them forward.